


In for an Amy, in for a Pond

by Charles_Rockafellor



Category: Amy Pond - Fandom, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe – Canon Divergence, F/F, Fade to Black, Fix-It, Fluff, Innuendo, Multi, Paradox, Selfcest, Yuri, implied sex, not smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27330109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/pseuds/Charles_Rockafellor
Summary: Amy stumbles into the TARDIS after having gotten lost deep within the TARDIS; clearly, there had been a bit of a time slip, leaving it stranded here... within itself.  While pursuing a change of clothes and a good bath, wondering who had rearranged her room, the TARDIS left for its next destination.  Stepping out into the control room, she found herself confronting herself.  Love was in the air, and no little lust, but there were still other Amys out there, and one can never have enough Amys.Join us here each week my friends, and see Amy's senses and sensibilities assaulted by cloaking devices, Glorificus, out of order messages, Vermicious Knids, and so much more!UPDATE 28 Jan 2021:I haven't abandoned this fic, I just got badly distracted writinga bunch of other storiesand burned out in Dec 2020.  I still have all of my notes and intend to finish it, but figured that I'd at least let everyone know that it might be a while.
Relationships: Amy Pond / Amy Pond
Comments: 17
Kudos: 6
Collections: Sci-fi, Singularity





	1. Amy's wife

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: Although I'm not terribly fond of Amy (she struck me as maybe a bit abusive), I rather liked the way that she flirted with herself (NB: 2011 Comedy Relief, [Space and Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E-wzgx1Vzc) mini-episodes, spec. “[Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXy-dMJ-gkw)”), even though it spoke to what seemed to me to be her narcissism (a lesser narc, in H.G. Tudor's terminology). This story presents a partial fix; it doesn't wave a magic wand over her relationship with Rory, but it permits the reader to shift focus to a softer, gentler, more classic Doctor type of arc that's centered around the Amys (while shamelessly robbing the rest of the show blind, from 1963 up... and maybe one or two other franchises).
> 
> As for Time Lords/Ladies or other such larger-than-life species and civilizations, please see the related study on scaling characters' relative power levels in writing and games, “[Superheroes: Powers and Principalities](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29371374)”.

Amy stared at it.

There it was, standing right in front of her. The TARDIS. She had no idea why it looked golden, but lighting was certainly a bit odd on this level. Blue... gold; she had a dress like that.

Shaking her head, she stepped inside, walking straight through to her room.

First thing was a relaxing bath and change of clothing, then food. It had taken her forever to find her way back here, and some of the less-traveled corridors really needed a good cleaning – and she'd yet to figure out how in the world she'd even managed to get down there in the first place.

_At last! This skirt was_ not _meant for hiking._

Stepping in, she found herself staring once more.

_What has Rory done this time?_

Everything was rearranged. The bed, the furniture – everything. Including her clothes, as it turned out. In fact, a good number of those weren't even hers.

_Lovely. The Doctor's gone and used my closet as spillover storage! Ooh, nice outfit, that – it'll look good on me!_

“What the bloody...?”

For the third time in as many hours, Amy found herself startled to a standstill, staring.

“Glad to see that you've made it,” the other Amy said, stepping around the console, just as the time rotor began to piston.

She couldn't help staring, her eyes traveling over the other. It was an odd but quite fetching outfit, halfway between the Red Baron and Captain Hook, and every inch of it skintight and riveting. It had to be the hat. Other-Amy wasn't wearing one, but Amy could just feel it there, tilted at a rakish angle.

_My_ God _, I'm incredibly gorgeous! If only she knew the thoughts going through my head right now..._

“I _do_ know the thoughts that are going through your head right now, you know,” the other said, “and really, they're rather shocking. Shall we go take care of that now, so that you can perhaps concentrate for more than five seconds, or shall we simply ravish each other right here? I won't mind either way at all, you know. Been looking forward to it quite a bit, truth to tell.”

“How did you – I –” she began, looking around for the Doctor, “Right then, there's been another one of those time things, hasn't there? How do we fix it this time?”

“I'm afraid not this time, darling. We're on our own, with all of the time in the world,” the other explained.

“Wait. Do you mean – then who's operating the TARDIS?”

“The Doctor, I imagine, or one of him, at any rate. Technically all of him,” her duplicate replied, “This is the SARDIV.”

“Sorry?”

“Void,” said the other, coming closer and leaning in as Amy found herself leaning backward against the wall, “Spacetime And Relative Dimension In Void. It comes from nontrivial zeroes of Riemann zeta on a degenerate set – not actually null, but good luck with the antiderivative. It helps to have an omnidirectional control device.

“It also takes some getting used to, what with E-space and everywhere else,” she said, running her fingers over Amy's shirtsleeve, “but there are some benefits. Also, you'll be glad to know that I keep a few more of your skirts on hand at all times, for fashion emergencies.”

“So, just to be clear: you're _not_ me.”

“I'm Amelia,” the other said, taking a step back to bow, “But yes, I'm you – at least I was you eventually – except that I never was.”

This gave Amy pause.

“Good Lord, you're as bad as he is!”

“I should be,” Amelia replied, “I've had some time to practice. Look, future-you had a bit of an incident with the heart of the TARDIS, absorbing the time vortex itself. No one's meant to have that power. If a Time Lord did that, they'd become a god. It split you into several versions. It took quite some time to get us all back together, not to mention the research, and you've no idea how much my heads ached with that. In the end, the only solution was to materialize the TARDIS outside of itself at a point parallel to the center of the universe, but in interstitial space. Needless to say, this presented an issue. We got it done, but between Blinovitch and all of the Artron energy buildup that we _each_ carried... we grounded out and it all overloaded, and the TARDIS had to be absolutely anywhere except wherever it was, but even _nowhere_ is _somewhere_ , all of this sort of shorting out the universe and resulting in a bit of a paradox, with time winds tilting the TARDIS across several boundaries that she was never meant to cross and a few directions that don't even exist, and me stepping out unscathed, you being you all over again, the rest of us out there, and the original you never having been exposed to the heart in the first place to cause all of this.

“In any event,” she sighed, “at least you're here now. It was only a matter of time. I've been going mad here, all by myself. Shall we simply start with lunch, then?”

“But, Rory. Well. _The Doctor!_ And home?”

“You're there right now, love. They're fine, and you're with them right now, since you never left. It's just that _you're_ here with me, while they're _there_ with you. None of this ever happened for them. Come on, you'll feel much better with a few biscuits in you,” Amelia said, taking Amy's hand and leading her off in search of a good meal, “We'll 'play doctor' later – cross our hearts.”

Amelia's hand was warm and comfortable, and the view afforded her of Amelia's bottom swaying back and forth in front of her was indeed a completely captivating compensation for the moment. If she hadn't known any better, she'd have sworn that Amelia was accentuating her movements just to draw her thoughts thither, focusing on delving therein.

_If only I could pry those–_

“Enjoying yourself back there, are you, dear?”

=====

“You can't have been here all that long,” Amy observed, setting aside the now empty salad bowl and reaching for her soup and sandwich.

“You'd be surprised what a little untempered vortex can do for a body,” Amelia smiled, “but the weather on Gallifrey didn't suit my taste.”

“You've been?”

“Had to, now didn't I? This ship doesn't exactly come with a 'read me' file **1**.”

“What did you wear?”

“A tuxedo, of course,” she said.

Amy waited a beat.

“You wore white, as I recall,” Amelia winked.

Amy gaped, “I never!”

“Not _yet_ , no.”

This veiled innuendo gave her some pause, sneaking peaks at her other self as she pretended to consider dipping her sandwich into her soup.

“Go ahead and dip, I like the way you purse your lips around the bread when you do. And the way the juices still drip from your chin afterward.”

Blushing furiously, she proceeded to do just that nevertheless.

“And it was a smoky blue, with muted gold and silver-gray brocade. What can I tell you? It was true love at last.”

Then it hit her, “Why did you go to Gallifrey?”

“I had to learn how to drive this thing.”

“Then _how_ did you get to Gallifrey?”

“I had to learn how to drive this thing.”

“What did you do after?”

“A bit of this, a bit of that,” Amelia said, “and then I waited.”

“For...?”

“For you, of course.”

“That's a change.”

“Well, I waited once before, you might remember, so I had some practice.”

“But you didn't have to, this time.”

Amelia remained silent.

“You didn't, did you?”

“The SARDIV can get a bit stroppy,” was all that she said.

“Oh you poor thing! How long?”

Again, Amelia was silent.

“How _long_?”

“Long.”

“What, like our Rory?”

“Longer.”

Amy melted inside, reaching out to put her hand on Amelia's.

Amelia smiled, though it still held a touch of gray.

“Water under the bridge. You're here now, and that's what matters. So here we are, and it all comes down to... just _another happy ending_.”

“Yes, well,” Amy replied, then realized that she had no snark remaining in her just then, ending with “just don't you go thinking that a sob story will get you anywhere, miss.”

Amelia looked at her sidelong, saying “Not at all, Heaven forfend. I had in mind dinner and a movie first! I don't just whip out my sonic probe **2** and show it to a girl before the first date.”

**O ~~~ O**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **1** Read Me file: Not technically true. The SARDIV has an Index File just as much as any good TARDIS should. She's just not always quite as forthcoming as one might wish... just as one might well expect of any canon-TARDIS, at this point.
> 
> **2** Sonic probe: This version has all of the usual bells and whistles, but also doubles as an MIB red flashy thing (neuralyzer circuits courtesy of some nice young gentlemen in suits) and psychic paper. Amy further discovers that it serves other – and much more “personal” – functions.


	2. Desperately seeking Amy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Button, button, who's got the button? You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out...

“ _Fuck!_ A little warning next time, maybe?”

Amelia lay there, eyes glazed over happily as she stared at her without focus.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I didn't hear you complaining.”

Amy rolled over, pretending to be offended.

Warm breath across the back of her neck. Teeth grazing her spine, followed by a slow kiss, her skin sucked in exquisitely.

“Well, if you've had enough,” Amelia said, her voice thick and low as her fingertips slid gently down Amy's lower back and past the base of her spine, “I suppose that I should just pack it in and go see about breakfast then, hmm? Conserve my energy – maybe compose a sort of... _Nethers Theorem_?” She chuckled at her own joke, but Amy didn't mind, as long as Amelia kept up what she doing to her nethers.

It was another hour before they at last got out of bed, though thick bacon and cucumber sandwiches with mayonnaise and cheese and cress made even that worthwhile.

“Come along, then,” said Amelia, swatting Amy's rear sharply, “The Carcosa void where the shadows lie: an ultralow-velocity zone extending five hundred miles up. Oh my, yes – up, and up, and up... an enormous Baobab **1** plaster casting with the Baobab taken out. Did I say ' _Baobab_?' I'm sorry, terribly flighty of me: I meant ' _baobab_.' It's baobab all the way up, of course, minus the baobab. The Carcosa void, all the way up... and that all comes down to subduction – mind the alliteration and the pun, those are the clever bits, you know – the last bits of Gondwana account for the large low-shear velocity province all about, which accounts for the impenetrable cloud cover.”

Amy peered up, sniffing the damp air even as she rubbed her butt, still sore within from constant overuse of late. A stepped pyramidal structure loomed nearby, the cavern above losing itself to the eye as it climbed, vast features made small by the surface distance and the altitudes, mists lying all across the land, fog banks curling through the air higher up.

“Is it safe down here?” she asked, thinking of the world's mantle pressing in all around them.

“Merry bit of hell on the surface just now,” explained Amelia, “Far too much sulfur and brimstone for my taste. I don't imagine you fancy a basalt bath?”

Amy stuck her tongue out at her, her nose wrinkling just a bit.

“Most definitely, but later,” Amelia replied.

She just rolled her eyes at Amelia's incorrigibility as they stepped out among the cattails.

Vast land ammonites abounded in the mirk, obscured further by towering stands of trumpet-topped grasses, their rhizomes covering the ground as their trunk-like tendrils sought light and air, sinister nettle-like filaments brachiating further and further to become fuzzy clouds of thistles surrounding them, ensnaring unwary creatures and draining them. An unpleasant miasma hung all around as they approached the ziggurat.

“Kiss for good luck?”

Amy cocked her brow, but gave her a peck anyway, only to be drawn in for a more lingering embrace.

“Hey now, I thought you said 'kiss'?”

“That was one, wasn't it? And one like that's bound bring good luck indeed,” Amelia said in a cocky tone.

Amy licked her lips, and had to agree, leaning in for a last nip.

“Wait, where's the TAR– where's the _SARDIV_ got to?”

“Cloaking device, thirty first century and top of the line. I nicked it while the captain wasn't looking!”

“Good job, I can't even see anything out of place.”

“It was a bit primitive, and I had to make a few adjustments. I expanded its capabilities some so that it cloaks against _all_ senses. Essentially it's a non-massenergy non-event at a non-spacetime coordinate with a squared probability of zero. Brilliant piece of work – my adjustments, obviously, not the cloak itself – even the foliage doesn't know that it's there! Now, then: you owe me a kiss, young lady. You jinxed our luck with that.”

Doing her very best to assume a contrite and innocent look, Amy put her hands behind her back once more, looking upward from her slightly down-turned face, eyes wide and hips swiveling as she pouted – and _this_ time, she took care to ensure that Amelia found her kiss quite satisfactory indeed.

As they approached the grand stairway, Amelia stopped short.

“Wait. What was that?”

“What was what?” Amy looked around.

“I don't know, I wasn't listening. My ears took a look.”

Mounting the stairs and gaining the mezzanine, they slipped into the cool darkness within.

Guards stood to either side of the main gallery, or the nave as Amy thought of it immediately. They didn't stir, seeming to have been stood as if to guide them forward, though whether an honor guard or prison guard was yet to be determined.

A Neoeocaecilian sat astride a clear-topped nautiloid mount in what might be considered the apse, the mount's shell accordioned back. The mounted figure cut a curious aspect, looking for all the world to be a giant skink of pale green with shimmers of iridescent neon running in bands along its sides, while its face hinted at that of a dragon.

“A what?” Amy asked.

“A Neoeocaecilian,” Amelia repeated, “they disappeared... ohh, what's it been now? Why it must be going on a hundred sixty five million years ago, now.

“Hello, your majesty, what _are_ you doing here then?” she asked, turning back to the throne shell, “We're looking for someone, a friend of ours about so tall, red hair... absolutely irresistible? Perhaps you could lend us a hand.”

His court spacious, a generous twenty feet from floor to ceiling, but brooding with ceilings of whorled art and pillars as thick as they were tall. Robed figures lurked in the side aisles, their trains dragging for ten feet and seeming to cover thick tails, even as the skirts thereof emitted clicks as if from claws of imagined centipedes of equal size.

“You're wet,” said the king.

“Yes, well, the air is positively dripping out today, and we just felt like a walk. You know how that can be. About our friend...?”

Amy took a shag towel from a servant holding a polished hematite platter, handing another to Amelia. The Woodlouse curled slightly in a bowing motion, walking away backward.

“I am God-king Grieg the Crimson. Foreign species are unwelcome here. You will leave or be forcibly ejected.”

Amelia turned as if to leave, then turned back.

“Is that a yes or a no, though?”

The wall to either side stepped closer. Taking a second look, Amy realized that they were in fact rather large beings of indeterminate species, merely so very large large that they _appeared_ to be walls.

“Right. Well, we'll be off now.”

Turning once more, Amelia made for the door.

“What's the plan?” Amy hissed.

“The plan is cunning.”

“...and the plan is...?”

“Oh absolutely brilliant.”

“You don't have a plan, do you?”

Amelia turned to her and grinned, “I plan to find our girl. Isn't that enough?”

Going back down the stairs, they noted a small pond to the side that had been hidden on their way in. Stopping to admire it, they were approached by a Belemnoid. Another glided behind it more slowly, bearing in its many arms a sort of checkerboard with assorted stones.

“She was here, but now she's gone.”

Amy gasped.

Amelia held their gaze, inasmuch as one could.

“What do you mean, 'gone'?” she asked.

Presently, they pointed to an arch of stone. Adjusting several gemstones just so on the board before them, they waited.

The space within the arch began to glow, pixelating into neon static before resolving into a slowly swirling amorphous palette of pastels and pearl tones, metallic highlights dominating the periphery.

Amelia studied it for a few moments, as if consulting an ephemeris.

“Right then, off we go – goodbye!” she said, turning on her heel and marching off toward the SARDIV.

“What, just like that? They say she's gone and we just pull a runner?”

“I know when she is now. Where's the only problem.”

“Where? Wait, how?”

“The edge of forever,” she replied grimly, as if answering both questions in one, “I told you that you jinxed our luck.”

**O ~~~ O**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **1** Baobab: Subscribers might recognize the slight but crucial difference in Amelia's wording there, but in case you're a first-timer, the key here really is the capitalization (though Amy can't hear the difference). Aside from normal capitalization rules of English, I add one further stipulation that the proper species-name of intelligent (i.e.: sapient [problem solving above a certain level], sentient [self-aware], or sophont [other-aware]) are also capitalized in the same manner as English capitalizes nationalities.


	3. If you're Amy and you know it, clap your hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 𝐻𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜 𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠, 𝑚𝑦 𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑; 𝐼'𝑣𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛, Amelia thought. She detested the Darkness. All sorts of unpleasant wriggly-crawlies crept about in it, and now it was wriggling and crawling about all for itself.
> 
> 𝑪͟𝑨͟𝑼͟𝑻͟𝑰͟𝑶͟𝑵: Please be advised that this chapter contains psychological suspense and horror elements. No overt gore or jump-scares, just atmosphere akin to Hitchcock -- but this 𝒊͟𝒔͟𝒏͟'͟𝒕 something you want to read alone on a Friday night in a creaky old mansion.

“Hold still just a little longer...”

“Could you please be done soon? I'm _really_ beginning to cramp here.”

“Ahh...” Amelia sighed, eminently satisfied, “Right there, hold it... almost... _yes_!”

Amy relaxed at last, rubbing her neck.

“So, how do I look?”

“Absolutely delicious, as usual,” Amelia said.

“Stop...” Amy replied, slapping her shoulder playfully even as she nodded, knowing full well just how completely right Amelia was when she said that – they _were_ both delicious _all_ over, after all, as she was reminded with every moment of Amelia's scents on her breath – then peeked around the edge of the canvas.

It was a masterpiece, and she said this without any bias.

“How did you manage all of this?” she asked, truly amazed.

“Sonic paintbrush, though it helps to have a four-dimensional canvas and paint that runs where you tell it. I also write Shakespearean plays and sonnets, compose pieces of the Romantic Period, and practice Venusian aikido. I've even studied under _Merlin_!”

It was a beautiful piece, she had to grant, worthy of da Vinci even. Medieval colors and landscape, sort of Greco-Roman architecture, fantastic birds and beasts against some alien sky of deep orange, and the two of them nude. She leaned closer, cocking her head to sort out just what they were in the middle of...

“You never said we'd be doing _that_!” she gasped in utter shock.

“Just wait 'til we _actually_ do!” Amelia replied, reaching around her waist and pulling her close to nibble.

“And I thought _I_ was insatiable. Don't you _ever_ think of _anything_ else?”

“You are, and not much – nor do you, so we don't. Why, do you think we should?”

Amy opened her mouth to object, then thought better of it, sliding into Amelia's lap instead.

After a few minutes of canoodling and then some, Amy leaned back, brushing some hair away as if absentmindedly, and fixed Amelia with a look.

“What are we going to do if we find her? Or them?”

“Well,” Amelia began, “a lot more of exactly what we've been doing, only with more of us, and less searching.”

“I'm serious! I mean, what about us, and the sleeping arrangements, and...”

Amelia waited.

“Oh,” Amy said, stunned at the thought, “You don't really mean...”

Amelia continued to wait.

“No! Not all of us... Not all at once and...”

Amelia's eyebrow lifted, a brazen look beginning to glimmer from her eyes.

“You can't possibly–”

Amelia simply waited some more, her hands exploring idly, causing Amy to twitch as she thought it all through.

“Well... I suppose it wouldn't be _all_ bad... not even half...” Amy conceded, imagining all of the possibilities as she returned her attention once more to exploring Amelia's more intimate bits.

“ _Amelia Jennifer Pond_ , you absolute besom!”

“You mean 'Jessica'? And which one of us are you?” Amy asked, turning to the newcomer.

The newcomer stood there waiting, a look of infinitely-tried patience on her face.

“Hi, mum,” said the seated one.

“ _Mum?_ ”

“And you, mum.”

Amy got up hastily and backed away.

“To be fair,” Amelia said, speaking again at last, “she's not precisely our daughter, more of an 'us' who came from us all.”

“That's. _Not._ An improvement!” Amy spluttered.

“And you, young lady,” Amelia said sternly, turning back again, “You're not supposed to be here yet.”

“I just wanted to pop in and see... besides, you sent a kiss-o-gram, and she was here all alone, so what else was I to do? And how was I to know that she didn't know that I was me and not you? And we didn't actually do anything, I swear... not much... that we haven't already done... eventually...”

One could hear a pin drop.

It was then that the handcuffs chose to drop.

“Just you wait until you get home, Jennifer. We're going to have a few words with you. And with _me_ , while I'm at it,” Amelia retorted, “Now, off with you.”

“Can't I at least stay for dinner?”

The hungry puppy look. One of her most powerful weapons. Amy knew it well. Nobody had ever withstood it for long.

It didn't fail this time, either.

“Fine, but then it's straight home and right to your room,” Amelia relented.

“Thanks! You're the best!” cried Jennifer, wrapping them in a hug, and kissing them each soundly.

In the end, it was late, and she ended up staying to visit just a little longer, but she left promptly after, first thing right at the crack of late afternoon, as they'd all stayed up rather late into the night, and it had been an even more exhausting morning after that.

Sleeping between the two of herselves had been blissful for Amy, and she didn't want to let Jennifer go.

“Don't be a stranger,” she said, kissing Jennifer one last time as they saw her off, the time window glittering as if it were a vertical pond of shards, “Come back and visit again soon. And don't worry about packing.”

Just as Jennifer leaned into the kiss, prolonging it, Amelia leaned in and whispered “She's triplets, by the way – and you're going to absolutely love what Jen and Jenny get up to.”

=====

“Alright. So. Where are we off to next, then?” Amy asked, her thoughts still on Jennifer's enthusiasm and energy. Quite an imaginative and inventive girl, in fact. She couldn't wait to meet all three of herself together.

“I'm not entirely sure. I wasn't there. Like you, I've only just got here myself.”

“After all of that with Jennifer, you're saying that you haven't been here?”

Amelia tapped a gauge, then adjusted a few knobs, “Not yet, no. I'm a much later me, and all of the earlier mes are going about what they're doing. I'm the one who's here while they're at their theres, and they weren't here, so I'm here because I was the one who was here back when I was them. When events are a set point in time, it's easy to navigate it all blindfolded, simple as a nothing-grinder; when things are in disarray, it's like so much gray mist, and you have to feel around for the hummocks as you peer at slopes that keep changing direction.”

“Of course, silly me,” Amy replied, hugging her, “What was I thinking? Forgive me?”

Mollified, Amelia nodded, “You can make up for it later. Right now, we have to find Jessica.”

“You mean Jennifer? She just left.”

“Focus, Amy. That was Jennifer, a sort of Amy-once-removed, an Amy of the second kind; this is Jessica – an Amy of the first kind. And don't mind the reverse Hynek scale, it was in serious need of overhaul. I mean, who starts with 'one' as some remote something and goes to three as the immediate case I ask you? Except for stellar generations, of course, but that's just as idiotic: counting _backward_ in generations, as if the current stars birthed their predecessors.”

“Right. One question. With you and three Jennifers, and now Jessica and counting kinds of Amys... just how many of us are there later, and do I get to...?”

Amelia smiled a coy smile, “Spoilers, darling – but believe me when I say that you _won't_ be disappointed in the least. Ahh, _mes amis_... none of us will. Now focus.”

At this, she brought down three levers in staccato procession, and rotated a large red wheel.

Mahogany and brass, green felt with an amethyst ring set all 'round, immaterial soap bubbles drifting up and down in lava lamp blobs, and odd little symbols all over the place. Coxeter graphs, Amelia called them; and Tutte-Coxeter graphs... and prime knots, and orbifolds and topological nets, and a rambling string of other names. Doing any one thing at all caused everything else to change shape and readout. Amy found it a wonder the whole thing hadn't blue-screened. Amelia changed the array almost daily, but it all seemed to be slowing down some. At least Amy hoped so.

“How do you manage what with all of these displays and bits just wheeling around like a mobile and popping in and out of existence and wandering through things like a ghost? I had enough trouble with an automatic transmission, and these won't even stay the same size when you so much as wave your hand in their direction!”

“It's much better arranged in seven dimensions, and you can fit in so much more that way,” Amelia replied, her eyes wandering down Amy's side as she reached over.

“Oh, no. I know that look. No seven-dimension-anything _back there_ , I'll thank you!” Amy exclaimed, holding her hands low and behind herself as she backed up firmly to the console.

Amelia had the good graces to look abashed just before she hit a big red button.

The engine engaged, the time rotors cycling to their old familiar song.

“Don't look now, but I think she likes you,” she said knowingly, “Listen to that satisfied sigh.”

**WE'RE SORRY,**

**YOU HAVE REACHED A DISCONNECTED UNIVERSE.**

**PLEASE HANG UP AND DIAL AGAIN.**

“Well now. I suppose it's better than closed ports or a syndrop...”

“So what went wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Amelia said, bounding around the control console and peering at things, “I expected this.”

Amy raised a brow.

“Mostly. I mostly expected this.”

Amy propped her hand against the console and waited.

“Well, I mean at least somewhat. In a roundabout fashion. Things like this always happen. Or sometimes, anyway. They're bound to.”

“You've no idea what's going on, have you?”

At this, Amelia turned to face her, prevaricating, “Of course I do. We're just in a sort of universal blind spot. The good news is that I don't see any sign of Great Old Ones or their pets. Now I'm just looking to find its optical nerve, as it were.

“Before we're pointed to the null by a Daemon...” she muttered.

“What's that about a demon?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. Almost have it...

“There's no place like zero one zero zero one zero zero zero... never mind.”

With this, she re-engaged the time engines.

Amy brooded, watching Amelia dusting her hands off.

“The SARDIV running and all reminds me. You're a Time Lord and–”

“Lady,” Amelia corrected.

“Fine. You're a Time _Lady_ and you still go by 'Amelia.' How's that, then?”

“I chose to call myself 'Amelia.' ”

“Right. How do you figure on that instead of going by whatever else, something lofty – something like _The Doctor_ or _The Master_ , or maybe _Glorificus_?”

“No. I don't go by Amelia anymore, I chose to _call myself_ 'Amelia.' For one thing, 'Glorificus' is already taken – by Glorificus. For another, what loftier title than 'Amelia' could there possibly be?”

“Oh, right. Fair points then. Wait – Glorificus is _real_?”

“Of course! Do you think that TV writers have the imagination to invent all the things that they do? Oh no, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in their philosophies – so they keep the world in the dark, shamelessly rob the real histories blind, and collect a paycheck.”

“What about cool super-powers? Are you looking forward to your first regeneration?”

“I've been through several now,” Amelia smiled.

“Oh. I had no idea. Wait then, how is it you still look like us?”

“Well it's not as if there's anything to improve on, now is there?” she asked, waving her hand at herself as she gave a little twirl, then letting her eyes rove over Amy's figure, “Except maybe getting a few more of us. That always makes everything so much better.”

Standing on an open-air platform, they gazed into the abyss. The single largest void between superclusters in the cosmos.

This was the research facility at the edge of forever.

“Forty quadrillion light years. A blister on the face of existence.”

“It's one funny looking assortments of ships they have here. When are we again?”

“We are coterminous with every point in time, here. Some of those ships don't even exist, drifting in from other timelines, only to drift back out again. It's as I said before: _where_ is the problem.”

“Fine then, oh ye of grand cosmic infinite wisdom: _where_ are we?”

“The edge of forever,” Amelia said slowly, “They built this place because of its nature, an overlap of itself, the two phases of space forever fizzing and merging. That ring structure all around is actually several million light years from here, to give your eye some sense of scale. The stars behind us are the nearest galaxies, fading as one comes nearer here and more under the influence of this bubble. Ahead, in all of its liquid darkness, lies the Abyss. Quite a bit larger than the universe that you're familiar with, I can assure you.”

“And that's it, then? What else is out there?”

“Nothing!” she spat, making it sound a curse, “Damn, I was afraid of that!”

“What?”

“They research nothing here, and it researches them right back.”

“If they aren't researching anything, then what are they doing here?”

“They perform quite a bit of research here. Far too much of it, in fact.”

“Nope, sorry Amelia, still not following you on this one.”

“It's precisely _nothing-ness_ itself that they research. It's a question of trying to get something from nothing, quite literally, and that never leads to anything good.”

She glanced around, listening to the silent breeze drift across the empty structure.

“Vermicious Knids. They cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.”

“Wait. I know that one. Darkness, isn't it?”

“Precisely. What do you think Vermicious Knids _are_? Some things are outside of sensory range, but Knids are cunning. They evolved themselves right away from that, and hide at the _middle-est_ point of your sensory ranges so that you can't notice them unless you're sensing right at that point. They're like your shadow when there isn't any light. They were here before the beginning of the universe before this one, and now they slither through what you only _think_ you can see. Sometimes they take different forms, or appear to be different, but every civilization knows them, every _animal_ knows them. They live in the ticks between the tocks. They are the Boogie Man, the Monster In Your Closet or Under Your Bed, the Thing That Goes Bump In The Night.”

“Knids? Go on, pull the other one then. I've read the book, and they're nothing like that. Or almost not.”

“If anything pulls your leg here, you're in a great deal of trouble. Also, I told you before that writers just steal the hidden histories, sometimes by psychic archetypal osmosis, and in any case they don't always get the details right, and often enough don't care to. Knids want only two things: to haul you into the darkness in silence and have you for dinner, or to haul you into the darkness in silence and have you.”

“You don't mean?”

“They're oviparous vampiric Illithid-things, and I'll spare you the details of their reproductive cycle. As it is, they can sustain your life for quite some time, and dinner could well last a thousand years with them. Well, enough pep-talk, off we go then,” she said, walking briskly toward a doorway, its frame blinking spasmodically, “time to descend into the darkness. And remember: a light source will work, but don't bother with ' _Ulysses_ ' or ' _Odysseus_ ,' as neither one works on these.”

Making their way into the cargo area, they found nothing amiss. Abandoned, empty, disused, but nothing overturned. One light was out, a hover-pallet sat blinking on pause, and a few other such oddities stood out, but no actual damage or mess as such.

“Here comes a candle, to light you to bed...”

Shadows outlined shapes of people, as if smoke had shot through where they'd stood, only for them to become greasy smudges across whatever surfaces had lain behind them.

Down the concourse they traveled, the silence heavy with every breath, a brooding weight that followed their every step.

At times, it seemed as if shadows moved across the walls.

At the very end stood a vast cafeteria, food stuffs so far gone as to have mummified: grown stale, then moldy, and now all but dust. All of the seating had been pushed to the perimeter, while at the center of the room there stood a large pile of spice cakes, a trail of crumbs bearing straight and true for a well-lit passage.

Along ramps and down stairs, all was silent, the trail of cake crumbs their only companion. The light grew slowly dimmer, as if the very air itself were tired, as if time itself had grown old and weary.

In the distant mists, dark figures moved and twisted, the light playing on one's mind and conjuring all manner of foreboding and foreshadowing forms.

The trail came to a ventilation grill, continuing onward therein once the grill was removed.

After what seemed like miles more on their hands and knees, the shafts and gangways opened into roomier tunnels, a thin dust covering everything.

The trail continued along, on top of the dust, though it held a thin layer of its own.

Here the air tasted flat and dead, and even the light felt old and tired, grayer than it had any right to be.

Her eyes were a vivid blue, in sharp contrast to the others' hazel.

They'd found her.

Jessica.

“At last! I was getting a bit tired of crawling around beneath decks for spice cake,” she said cheerfully as they entered the maintenance room. It was ten feet on a side, all of smooth concrete, with small, yellow, industrial lights held in cages.

“It was that _spice_ cake that did the trick, you know,” Amelia said, “I remember how much you complained of it when I got back to the SARDIV and there you were, right in the middle of a spice cake rant as I recall.”

“Oh I remember how that will be, and completely agree with myself even more right now. Still and all though, you found the trail of breadcrumbs and got my message,” Jessica finished for her from the center of a group hug, their arms wrapped to either side of her like a children's game of oranges and lemons, “And not that I mind, but who's hand is that?”

“Yes indeed, you clever girl. Melange...” Amelia said, giving her a happy kiss and looking back out the doorway, “little wonder you've managed to avoid them all this time. Well then, shall we?”

“Why didn't you eat anything else? Surely on a facility this large there are other foods available,” Amy asked, trailing along and sneaking glances at Jessica whenever she thought Jessica might not be looking.

“I needed every edge I could get,” Jessica replied, “Spice helps – and the more, the better – but I'm no Amelia.”

They worked their way farther through the tunnels, passing deserted stations and foundational areas of indiscernible purpose, yawning spaces with tools strewn about, grottos with small lakes of precipitated moisture and showing signs of karst growth, eventually exiting and on their way to a large, open lecture hall that Jessica said that she'd seen Amelia was going to go to at this point.

The way there was a study in the bizarre.

Silence and emptiness abounded. Darkness pooled unnaturally where no shadow should lie. Unfinished wood panels covered another cafeteria, statues of all periods sat in niches spaced aperiodically, primitive masonry gave way at once to force fields, with Amelia remarking at other times on metamaterials and aerogelled neutronium, some of the rooms and furnishings were clearly meant for any number of diverse species wholly non-Human, some walls seemed to flow as if viscous while the air in others felt thick and unyielding... and every so often they could almost see something moving through the corners of their eyes – a hint of movement, an almost-seen wisp of discolored smokiness, the impression of something flashing by one way or crawling the other – though each time that they looked, there was never anything there. Nothing more than an uncanny certainty that whatever it had been was still there. Right there. Watching.

“Hello, I'm Amelia, and I can do all sorts of marvelous things that you can't,” she called out into the echoing darkness, clapping her hands, which Knids certainly can't. Her greeting was met with resounding silence.

“Tell me something. We aren't quite in the Abyss, nor in N-space. Instead, we stand in a spatially unstable region where the laws aren't always what they should be. What do you suppose might happen if someone were to accidentally release a catalyst to spontaneously break the zero point level even a little bit, hmm?”

The Darkness shifted uncomfortably.

“Yes, you can see how that might go... emission of all sorts of radiation – _light_ , for example – released as a condensate from space itself, spreading outward even as that same catalyst spread outward with comoving space... nasty affair, really. Couldn't stay ahead of it, I imagine.

“How about this, instead: do you recognize this machine? It's a psychic reifier, a primitive sort of mind-bender. A little rough around the edges, I know, but it gets the job done. Let's all of us save a little time, then. Sit back and enjoy the show,” at which she drew her sonic probe and pointed it at the nearby reifier in question.

Images of her exploits began to play out before them, flashes of wars and dying planets, catastrophes and sinister plots, and through them all stood Amelia. Over and over again, their eyes able to blink, but their minds caught in the reifier's emanations, Amelia strode through time, on planets, spaceships, mining belts, continents of clouds, in cities afloat on oceans of acid, gazing out through the cornea of a living spaceship, striding undaunted through a rainfall of burning stone. At every turn, she stood ready, talking, discovering, protecting...

At last the show ran down, and she turned calmly to face the Darkness.

“And here comes a chopper, to chop off your head. This research facility? Basically: _run_.”

Something faded away at this point, leaving the air all around them a thinner thing than it had been. Cooler. Emptier.

It was at last once more a place where there was no Darkness.

“Now we're off to see the Jessie, the wonderful Jessie of Ooze,” Jessica informed them as they entered the SARDIV.

“Now, let's get you out of those clothes and into a bathtub built for three,” Amelia said, entering the coordinates that Jessica gave her. As soon as she began rattling them off, Amy had asked where she'd gotten them from, but Amelia was a step ahead of her on that one.

“From watching me enter them right now. She's standing right there, well in view of everything that I do. What with all of the spice that she's consumed, she saw it coming long ago, so this moment has been burned into her memory for quite some time now.”

As the SARDIV began her next journey, they turned to a room dedicated to twister and baby oil, to celebrate Jessica's arrival. She'd been looking forward to this quite a bit.

**O ~~~ O**


	4. A-my, A-my, give me your answer do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Praxiperturbatōris, a world-city bouncing merrily through time, unaware of a tiny holonomy problem. Meanwhile, a practically Morlockian sphinx holds an Amy within it, if only our party can survive to get to her!

“Oh. My. Lord...”

“Aye, just imagine what you can do with these portals **1** once you really get the hang of them.”

“I _am_ ,” Amy replied, warming quickly to the idea, her mind already racing.

“With a few little stabilizing adjustments of my own design, you can place them as belts, collars, bracelets, rings, lipstick, glasses, piercings...”

Amy began to fill in the details, the images quickly progressing to different rooms.

“...plugs–”

“Plugs?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are some places that you can't quite reach even when you _can_ reach them.”

Amy's mouth dropped with the penny.

“Just think,” she continued, enjoying a certain schadenfreude as she watched Amy begin to squirm with anticipatory images, “which mouth goes where can be adjusted back and forth, they can even be linked so that a single entry portal results in multiple exiting bits from one or more exit portals simultaneously – or the other way around. They're real fun when you hand them out at parties, and pass around each portal's control keys as a game, or trade them and see whom you surprise next; you never know who's doing what with which bits to which other bits, or how many of any, and you can always link them all and set their functions to random or cyclical or some contextual rule-set. They also come with a _very_ popular zoom in-and-out function, in case any interesting bits aren't quite the right size for user-friendliness. They even have practical uses for food, water, air, communication, transportation, and toiletries, but somehow nobody ever gets past the tingly bits...”

Amy was practically panting from all of this.

“OK. I need to pee now, thanks.”

“We'll practice with them tonight. When there's more than just yourself involved, it gets really interesting. And complicated. And interesting. Did I mention interesting? And it's safe to say that Jessica will be happy to help, too.”

 _The one thing Aperture got right_ , Amelia reflected, _such a shame they never saw its potential in the entertainment industry. Hello, that gives me a thought... I'll have to tune one of the transmats into the shower when she's not looking..._

=====

“There!” Amelia exclaimed, pointing at the dully glowing mass that floated as a ghostly display in the middle of the room, a network of columns climbing out of the omnipresent cloud layers and rising into space, “I'd recognize those temporal beanstalks anywhere. Praxiperturbatōris **2** : a black dwarf, and an absolutely beautiful place. Every ten to the twenty-fourth years or so, they start up the engines and jump right back to the beginning of it all – or very nearly so, since they do tend to stop a bit short of the electromagnetic decoupling event – mining WIMPs the whole way through and collecting a new layer of interstellar dust on the way back up. Shame really; they'd get several quadrillion times that mileage if they'd simply harness proton decay...

“In any event,” she continued, “our destination lies on the surface. Luckily they're a sub-stellar brown dwarf remnant, rather than a stellar white dwarf remnant, so they licked the surface gravity problem ages ago. Somewhat less fortunately, it also means some sixty thousand miles of atmosphere. The surface has plenty of elbow room for everyone, what with a twenty thousand mile radius – practically twenty five times Earth's surface area, but not much chance of a nice sunset or starry night. Still though, remind me to swing by the algal cloud banks and metal salt coral air-reefs on our way out – they're positively _full_ of plankton-ray colonies darting about by electrogravitic Biefeld-Brown asymmetric capacitance, and Bussard flowers that drift along on organic ion drives... we can go jellyblimp watching! If we're lucky, we might even spot some pods of magnetohydrochutes!”

Jessica was trying to get the hang of a set of twenty-fourth century Mamosian telekinetic chopsticks to play with a four dimensional gyroscope when they set out – noting the difficulty of their having two planes of rotation simultaneously, with an entire axis not even being physically present from her perspective.

“It's got a six-dimensional setting, too. Three full planes of rotation, when you're ready for it,” Amelia mentioned off-handedly.

“Just keep your bottom to the wall if she goes near seven,” Amy nodded.

“Seven dimensions and my bottom,” Jessica began, “you don't say...?” she trailed off, shifting around just a little as she tried to focus on her gyroscope, her face taking on a contemplative look with every half-lidded glance in Amelia's direction.

Amelia watched her game-play for a moment.

“You're quite adept with that, you know,” she observed, “but I suppose that it comes with seeing what will happen and anticipating the more-interesting bits,” reaching down and squeezing one of Jessica's cheeks, then giving it a quick pat as she winked.

Jessica flushed at this, but still gave a small smile of acknowledgment.

Looking around at the decayed state of everything, Amelia shook her head.

No one said a word.

“They really do normally pick up the place some when visitors come 'round, you know...”

No one continued to say a word.

“Times like this, I really miss Bessie, even though that's just an imported memory,” Amelia said, shaking mud from her boot, “Well, at least it's just muck and not the Shalka – or _bad Carrots_ , I really hate those...”

Amy turned her head at this.

“Imported?”

“Oh yeah! Side effect of the incident that never happened: got a complete memory dump of the entire Matrix, and shot all up and down throughout the timelines – sideways even – for an infinity-eth of a second, I was everywhen all at once. Truly breathtaking view, though you've no idea what a headache it was.”

At last they approached a large structure. Something about it reminded Amy of a sphinx, or at least a minimalist-cubist sketch of one, its almost-head split into two almost-faces, with a second such (and slightly smaller) almost-head facing forward from its rear in a nearly chimaeric fashion.

A large group of Praxiperturbatōrians was gathered to the side, a number of them preparing to mount the stairs that led to the roof near the aft head, through which to enter into the structure.

Their manner made it evident to the group that they were indeed the local inhabitants that Amelia sought, though Amy had some difficulty processing their forms. Although some managed a remotely humanoid shape, others were blobs or somewhat geometric. In all, she had the definite impression of their being shaped like sodden mattresses. The squelching noises accompanying their every movement did nothing to belie this.

“Undifferentiated organs of intertwined tissue systems **3** ,” Amelia whispered to her, “They're basically Sponge-people.”

“These seven years have been our great blessing,” one Sponge was saying, though it didn't seem to hold much conviction of this as its gaze took in the somewhat decrepit surrounds, nor did it project any real sense of enthusiasm for the moment, “and so we turn now to give our thanks to the Sphinx, and offer our supplicants in propitiation.”

As one, the crowed throbbed, each of them becoming broader and lower-set before an annular bolus climbed upward from their bases like waves that beringed their bodies, growing steadily taller once more as the annuli rose and shrank around them.

The small group of Sponges immediately before the speaker, perhaps a dozen in all, made ready to mount the broad stairs leading up seven stories tall to the Sphinx's hip.

“Wait!” Amelia cried out.

Everyone turned at this unexpected interruption.

A murmur went through them as they saw the strangers behind, again crouching in a formal manner, though without regaining their full stance this time.

Amelia led the way to the speaker whose gaze remained fixed on the ground before their feet.

“Do you recognize us?” she asked once close enough to avoid raising her voice in order to be heard.

“Of course, most high one,” it replied, “You are the very form of the Wizard herself!”

“So then, you know where she is?”

The top of the Sponge's body bobbed, its eyes lurching to the side momentarily, toward the stair.

“And you can guess why the proceedings have been halted.”

The Sponge hesitated uncertainly at this.

“I fear not, Your Eminence.”

“Arise,” she said, then turned to the crowd and repeated this, “This year, there is to be a change in the schedule. If you'll all just go about your business, it will be sorted out shortly. For now, go eat, and enjoy the day together!

“Quickly now,” she whispered to the others, “before they start asking questions!”

The stairs had been a slow climb, gently inclined and traveling the full length from the forepaw rearward to the hip. Gentle or not though, they were still quite some height above the ground at the end of it, and afforded a dizzying view as they made their way thence to the upper level, what would be its back were it a living thing.

There, at the middle of the rear neck, stood a trapezoidal doorway some twenty feet in height and narrowing only slightly at the lintel, impossible to miss, set with broad gold slabs and decorated with polished lapis lazuli and ruby.

Nothing stirred but a silent and lonely breeze.

Even the crowd below had dispersed quickly when they'd begun their ascent, leaving the very area itself quite deserted.

“And this is a good idea, is it?” Amy asked.

“Absolutely not!” Jessica said cheerfully as she took the first step in.

The moment that they had all entered, the doorway behind them solidified, filling with a translucence that still conveyed a sense of solidity before a flash beyond lit the entrance hall that they found themselves in, accompanied by a thunderous crack and rumbling that shook their very bones, the air growing warm around them.

“Quietly now,” Amelia said as the crash lessened, holding her finger to her lips, “We don't want to tip our hand here.”

Making their way forward, they found room after room, lit sourcelessly, sparse decorations and furniture interspersed throughout. It was a curious mixture of lounges, office chairs, the odd piece of artwork. One room seemed to be an indoor park with climbing equipment and a small pond, another almost a theater system with soft recliners in clusters of two to four.

Nothing moved, nor was there any indication of occupants at any time.

Soon enough, they reached an elevator with a spiral stair to one side and a long and curving ramp to the other.

Taking the ramp, the sense of eerie anticlimax grew.

No Sponges, no guards, nothing.

At the same time, no windows, nor balconies, nor apparent exits had yet been in evidence.

“Escape might not be prohibited, but clearly none is designed into the arrangement.”

The others nodded at this, Amy taking Jessica's hand for reassurance, though just whose she couldn't have said.

The rooms to either side at no point offered more than a slight diversion, the floorplan clearly arranged to railroad anyone in a single direction, toward the head of the Sphinx.

Halfway there, the décor changed from neutral tones of tan and pale green to starker panels and sections of black and white, a harshness that was felt almost more than it was seen.

They stood there in what could be a grand ballroom, a continuous mural presenting a panorama of nature scenes all around, tables and chairs like those of a café lining the walls to either side, arches between them leading to shadowed sconces and side rooms as a chandelier cast soft light from its many prisms. Each crystal cast its own hue, with the facets presenting differing saturation and brightness, its ornate base three feet in diameter and dangling through the ceiling with a foot-wide gap between them.

The mural was beautiful, but dizzying.

“Spin one-half,” Amelia thought aloud after a moment.

Amy stopped herself before asking, this time. She was almost certain that to inquire further would trigger a physics lecture.

“You do realize that this is a trap, hey? If I ever learned a single thing from video games, it's that we've left the harmless training level, and this room will trigger a mini-boss, or at least the first obstacle.”

No sooner had Amy said this than the room began to shake, a grinding noise coming from every direction as the whole moved forward and a pillar of stone slammed down behind them, blocking any retreat.

Transparent dividers began to slide outward from every wall, sometimes dividing themselves orthogonally, presenting them with a rapidly recomplicating maze that filled the room to the ceiling as water began to puddle around their feet.

“Not to worry,” Amelia announced calmly, “All of our clothing has molecular memory and will adjust to the changing circumstance.”

“What about that circumstance?” Amy asked.

They turned to see what had her concerned.

A large rat, six feet in length and with a minimalist-cubist look about it much like that of the exterior of the complex itself, crept out of one of the recesses.

As they watched, others began to join it elsewhere along the walls.

“Hurry, up the divider here and onto that platform!”

The rats began exploring the maze as they made their way to relative safety, though this soon turned out to be short lived as the first few rats made their way here and there to the first level of platforms.

Glancing around for weapons or escape routes, Amy found nothing until her eyes rested at last on the gap around the chandelier.

“If we make our way up there,” she said, “we might be able to wriggle through and get away.”

The water rose only slowly, but so too did they, hampered as they were by false leads and dead ends that they couldn't see until running into them.

The rats continued their pursuit as well, hampered likewise and without apparent goal beyond getting to them.

In time, they made it, climbing up through the gap and finding that they then had to drop down to what should have been the upper room's ceiling.

Once through, the gap closed behind them.

“Did anyone else feel that? Sort of a woozy, slippery, azimuthal projection inversion outside-in feeling? As if you might need to walk a Kleinsche Fläche to get back to feeling yourself afterward?” Amelia asked.

No one else had.

Amelia watched as the etchings on the wall changed slowly, protruding a little more here, growing fuzzier in texture there, or acquiring a different hue at times.

The harsh black and white theme of the previous level had given way to interspersed patches of red and blue now, but somehow this failed to reassure anyone.

Nothing further untoward had yet happened, but nor had anything yielded the secrets of this sphinx.

“Tithed Sponges go in every seven years in sacrifice, right? So where are they?” Amy asked.

She'd been contemplating this for several minutes while Amelia had studied the wall.

“I'm not sure I want to know,” Jessica said quietly, thinking back to the Edge of Forever.

“It's just that there weren't any... Oh. I'm so sorry – I wasn't thinking,” Amy said, cutting herself off abruptly.

With no clear preference, Amelia pressed a blue panel in the forward wall, the panel then sliding back to permit them entrance to a hallway.

“Shall we?” she asked, bowing slightly for them to leave first should they so wish.

Making their way out, the panel sliding shut silently behind them and leaving no hint of its presence, they discovered a series of passages and hallways with doors set at intervals. Nobody opened a single door as they proceeded forward, or as nearly so as the twists and turns permitted.

After only a few of these, Amelia stopped.

“Do you hear something?”

She was the only one to do so, but they continued with greater caution.

“Now I _definitely_ heard something that time,” she said, looking down the hall to either side of the junction.

In that moment, a humanoid figure stepped out to the left. It was smooth skinned, with an almost plastic looking blue sheen. Turning the other way, they found another such, this time with a red sheen to it.

“Friendly, do you think?” Amy quipped.

The beings made their way toward them, and they backed away hastily. The side-halls were only a few paces long, and so it was only a moment before their pursuers came back into view.

Instead of turning toward them though, the beings engaged in a clumsy battle, seeking to touch each other by hand as they each dodged the other's same attempts.

In less than thirty seconds, they both succeeded, disappearing in a flash and leaving behind only a small puff of smoke and hint of ozone.

“Right,” Jessica said, “Note to self: do not shake hands with the guards.”

A hum in the air, and then two soft clicks.

Amelia crept forward.

Again, a figure to either side, one blue and one red.

Catching up to the others, she made the corner just as the new pair of figures engaged in battle. This time, the red one won, but the blue didn't disappear. Instead, it slumped in place as if deactivated.

Then the red one turned in their direction.

They returned to an earlier junction and proceeded along a different fork.

This process repeated a few times, sometimes a battle of two or more figures, sometimes one or two of the same color plodding after them.

It wasn't long before Amelia tired of this and began tinkering with one of the deactivated figures, a blue one in this instance.

The others waited, tense.

They soon made better headway as their retinue grew to a small gang of androids **4** pressed into reanimated service. They lost some, inevitably, but it was still headway. Often enough, the reintegration chambers released recently dispatched figures soon thereafter, but not always. Sometimes there were none nearby, but some seemed not to be functioning. The tide of this war shifted here and there as dispatching one through disintegration led to it being recreated for the winner's side, but left the winner unable to do more than grapple for several minutes thereafter. Sometimes they simply waited while one group of figures ambushed another, only to mop up the winning side with their own.

The whole affair was more exhausting than harrowing, but was no less nerve-wracking for it, and it didn't help at all that some of the hallways presented a physical rotation while maintaining “down” relative to whichever surface had been the floor upon entry. After a brief confusion wherein everyone had had to scatter, they also discovered that “down” could mean different directions simultaneously, if they entered a given hallway from more than one already-rotated hallway's orientation.

Their slow but steady progress led them onward and upward, the sphinx's forward head now almost certainly their destination.

Stepping at last through the doorway into the Wizard's command room, they found Jessie seated before a ball of watery substance six feet across. Displays arrayed throughout the room showed the interior of the sphinx from rooms and corridors at every angle, tracking their progress from the start.

“Hello, hello! We're here to rescue you. Care to come along for the ride?”

Jessie began to ask a question as she stared at each of herself in turn, her eyes narrowing in calculation, then stopped as more practical concerns took priority.

“Can't, thanks,” she said pointing to a zombot that stood by her side, her words pouring out rapidly, “One of the propitiants. This complex is supposed to serve the world, and instead it seeks to convert the population wholesale. They were once intended to act as servitors and interfaces, helping what they now call ' _the Wizard_ ' in enabling the organic aspect of block transfer computations to manifest from the solid state monocrystal complex, acting as advisors and companions until eventually replacing the Wizard once that one wearied of the task and passed on their accumulated wisdom and knowledge, but I can't communicate with anyone in the complex or outside, and the entire civilization seems to have forgotten this place's purpose. I have something of a facility with numbers, so I've been putting out brush fires since I arrived, trying to keep this place from demanding more and more. If I leave, there's no telling the consequences.”

Amelia's eyes wandered, taking in the room as she thought, landing on Jessica's gyroscope. Jessica hadn't bothered with it much since their entry into the snout of the sphinx, and even then only during lulls between the various threats as a poor distraction. The gyroscope hadn't been working well at all the whole time since leaving the SARDIV, and she'd thought that she'd been getting the hang of it before that.

“Odd. It should only be doing that if its holographic properties were off by pi over two...” Amelia thought aloud.

“Of course! It's been so incredibly obvious the whole time that I completely missed it!” she cried out, “With all of their dropping back to their starting time without adjusting for relative holonomy in comoving expansion, and completely ignoring the Hubble regression, they've been shifting their chirality at a twistor level the whole time!

“May I please have that? I'll get you another, I promise,” she asked, reaching toward Jessica's gyroscope.

Working hastily, she pried open the Wizard Interface, a solid-like panel-thing now allowing her access to the interior of the crystalline liquid ball. Easing the gyroscope into a space barely able to hold it, and certainly not designed to do so, she poked around with the sonic probe, fusing the toy to the quasicrystalline plasma that formed the internal circuitry of the system.

“There,” she sighed as she closed the panel and got back up, “That should take care of things.”

“Care to enlighten us, or were you planning to just stand around and look pretty all day?” Amy inquired.

“A little of each, I think,” Amelia replied, “Over the eons of their existence, Praxiperturbatōris has collected countless layers of dust and such, hmm? Now, they use whatever presents itself and flush the rest, right along with the WIMPs for their power supply, but every time that they leap back again, they – and all material accumulated over every previous run – are ever so slightly out of synch with the essential spin of the universe. It's nothing that you'd ever really notice as such, but it's cumulative, so that by now the total amount must be something like... c to the third over four G h-bar, with a lead coefficient of Praxiperturbatōris's Schwarzschild area of course”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that for every cycle that they leaped back again, they're ever so slightly more out of phase with everything else, and things got bodged that much more. The gyro there will right things again, adjusting their landing each time as it were, and they should stay on an even keel from now on.

“Now to simply hit the secret reset button so that the immune systems stop competing for resources and stand down unless actually threatened...”

Amelia's fingers danced across the surface of the ball, weaving paths and sometimes dipping in as if it weren't there or pulling it outward like a gummy fabric.

They watched the projections from all over the complex as the zombots integrated the revised protocols, networking with all others to become a replacement Wizard hive-mind. Red and blue changed to a warm golden glow over and over, until the last of them had been converted.

“What is your wish? We are here to serve,” Jessie's personal zombot said in a multitonal voice, as if many spoke as one.

The external displays showed the same scene everywhere as the new Wizard now projected itself to all points across the world as a remote astral presence.

“So, what's your answer then, Jessie? Care to come along for a ride? See the wonders of the multiverse? Explore your every passion? We have hot and cold running popcorn, and omniversal TV on tap.”

=====

Everyone was finally aboard the SARDIV once more, after a long and festive thanks and farewell from the Praxiperturbatōrians, and they'd watched the classic _The Muppets go medieval_ for movie night. Amelia suggested _Revenge of the surfboarding killer bikini vampire girls_ , as a nightcap. Remnants of several different pizzas lurked before them, vying for attention from beneath their reddish-orange oils.

“Surfboard killer...?” Amy asked, not sure that she was quite up to it.

Jessie leered, leaning in to breathe heavily into her ear “Scantily-clad, kung fu fighting lady vampires. What more need be said?”

As the evening progressed, Amelia mentioned in passing that the SARDIV's sensors could access all of itself, and everything that they did there, so they could always “spy” on live in-tempo “replays” of their past and future nocturnal activities and bloopers from any angle. After she pointed out that she could just wipe everyone's memory later to prevent spoilers and paradoxes, and that they could always watch it all for the first time again, they played a few through. Popcorn and raisinets and malt balls and twizzlers gave way to mimosas and giggling.

“One good thing about the time rotor's interference with the omnicomm,” Jessica commented in a lull between scenes, “you don't need to worry about the 'phone ringing in the middle of the best parts!”

With all of the goings on playing themselves out for their titillation, Amy had been considering the sleeping arrangement again.

“How is it that even with the four of us, we seem to always be right next to everyone else at once?”

Amelia's eyes lit up at this. Amy realized immediately what a terrible idea it had been to ask, even as Amelia launched into lecture mode.

“Consider this: in zero dimensions, everything's all in one spot, no space for neighbors; in one dimension, you can only abut one neighbor each at either end. Just as disappointingly, if the bed's space were rearranged as the 1-surface of a 2-ball, then each person can sleep between the pair of others – though that example leaves one in a head-to-tail ring, since you'd all be lying in a circle around an empty disc. Two dimensions doesn't really improve things beyond a simple radial arrangement, and that still isn't terribly close to sleeping next to one another. In three dimensions, things get interesting, though a little uncomfortable, if one considers a dogpile, so you'd really want the 2-sphere of a 3-ball – as long as you then adjust the metric so that it's a bit more parabolic than a true sphere, more like the 2-surface of a 3-cylinder, giving a bit more space at the head, and taking away some from the lower latitudes, so that there isn't this increasing distance between everyone the further down the bed you slide; you don't want a full three sixty everywhere, after all. You can take that up to four people sleeping in a bed that's set to the 2-sphere of a 3-ball and even though they're arranged in what amounts to the vertices of a tetrahedral configuration, they're still all right next to everyone else all at once; mind, for holonomic reasons, you'd really rather the 3-sphere of a 4-ball – a 4-ball being a glome, by the way – giving four people an arrangement more like the skeleton of a tetrahedron... or wait, would that be more similar in some ways to a three dimensional vertex-centered projection of a pentatope? You see, this is why I always say to never drink and _derive_.

“In any event, continue to five people and you'll want the 4-sphere of a 5-ball instead of the more pedestrian Euclidean embedding dimension, and they'd be arranged like a pentatope, all next to each of the other four, in every pairing combination at once. You just keep going and you have space for n-many people lying next to every single one of the others at the points of a hypertope spread over the n-minus-one dimensional sphere of an n-dimensional ball. By way of example, let's say that you had fourteen of us sleeping in one bed; you'd just need the bed to configure itself to the 13-sphere of a 14-ball, or simply the 13-surface of a 14-cylinder, and everyone would be comfortably cozy and able to roll over and face any one of the others with complete ease, and none of the sardine can issues of packing in three dimensions. In every case though, it's actually a fractal dimensionality just above however many dimensions are involved – think of it as plus one for the bedding set – so that one can still get out of bed to either side without disturbing anyone else. Then the only real problem left is whom to blame for pillow and blanket thefts. You won't even need to worry about who has to sleep in the wet spot!”

“Of course. As simple as that...” Amy nodded, none the wiser for it, but no less drawn to Amelia's brilliance. She became aware of a certain _itchiness_ making itself known as she pictured such a sleeping arrangement. So many of herselves all around, Amelia's brain the size of a planet, Jessica knowing just when and where where best to lick or rub or poke or squeeze before anyone else knew it herself...

Jessie paused the viewer.

“I just saw some beautiful nooks in the garden – the psychic sub-titles said that it was a perfect replica of the Shill Governor's mansion on Shillana – could I go see?”

“You two go on ahead. We'll be there shortly,” Amelia said as she began arranging a picnic basket, tossing in a self-replenishing bag of assorted miniature doughnuts just as Jessica joined her.

“What's that?” Jessica asked, pointing to a tub of custard-like substance as Amy and Jessie got up.

“It's blue.”

“Yes, I can see that, but blue _what_?”

Sticking her finger in for a taste, she nodded in surprise.

“I see. It _is_ blue, isn't it?”

Amy was more than happy to give Jessie a private tour of the garden, giggling as she took Jessie's arm and told her of a species of dictyophora there with the most amazing scent and effects...

**O ~~~ O**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **1** Portals: These would be Amelia's improved version of portal guns, the design for which she'd “liberated” from Aperture Science Laboratories (i.e.: the video game “Portal”).
> 
> **2** Praxiperturbatōris: Don't bother going nuts trying to look this one up. It's not canon DW, nor a nod to any other fandom. This is a name and a planet of my own imagining. I figured that it might be better to give you the heads-up than to leave you wondering.
> 
> **3** Intertwined systems: This species inspired by a reddit comment “Instead of distinct organs they have a myriad of intertwined tissue systems. Like how the limp system is intertwined with the circulatory system but all of their tissues are distributed like that.” and the Zem-Mattresses of Sqornshellous Zeta.
> 
> **4** Zombots: Based on a mix of the Axons (Dr. Who) and some 'bots in a dream; not related to the Handbots of “The girl who waited” (though I was tempted to boost them a little along the lines of the Raston warrior 'bots from “The Five Doctors”).


	5. Amelia, you're breakin' my heart, you're shakin' my confidence, baby...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The SARDIV lands in what appears to be a reproduction of Castrovalva, and our heroes find themselves treated to a sumptuous meal while in pursuit of Jess, the next Amy on their list. Guest starring Lord Blackadder and Baldrick.

Amy awoke to the most pleasant sensations.

She wasn't entirely sure of just who it was, but they were doing the most amazing things.

Coming awake by degrees, she gave herself over to their gentle caresses, the intimate nips and tugs, the gentle prying and exploration.

Rolling over, she found Jessica dead asleep. Sure that it had been her, Amy turned to Jessie instead, who had indeed been starved of companionship.

She, too, was quite asleep – as was Amelia, in her arms.

Wide awake now, and in no small measure unnerved, Amy crept out of bed.

The lighting was dim, but sufficient to the task of making one's way out in the middle of the night for a bathroom break or a midnight snack. In four dimensions, plus one for the bedding – at least she _thought_ that it was four or five, the hyperspherical shell areas and hyperball volumes of Amelia's explanations never having fully gelled for her – this was something of a necessity. Something about the extra dimensions involved permitted you to be completely surrounded by yourselves and still slip out of bed with ease, like a line segment sliding out from between others and along any longitude at one pole of a sphere and then onto the ray to either side of the tangent point at the other pole... or at least something like that; she was a bit hazy on Amelia's details there, too.

She didn't look too closely as she got up, since the bed tended to have a ghostly visual overlay that Amelia had tried explaining as the prismatic shadow of n-plus dimensions projected at some angle theta acting as a bosonic cross-section... the whole thing simply didn't keep its size and shape, presenting several at once instead and these often varying over time, even while watching it clearly remain exactly so, shimmying a little whenever she looked at it for any length of time so that it felt as if the room's own eyes were watering instead of hers. This time, she could swear that the blanket was humming like the time rotor.

From the feel of things, _someone_ had certainly been doing _something_ in her sleep, but it could hardly have been the SARDIV... could it?

Considering a bathrobe momentarily before discarding it as pointless, she padded naked to the toilet and then made her way onward to the kitchen in search of food. The air in the SARDIV always felt like a gentle hug, and anything more than gossamer felt like too much. Now to take her mind off of things: sausages and brown sauce, that should do the trick. And maybe a little ice cream with hot fudge. And pie; definitely some pie.

=====

The SARDIV had taken them to an English garden surrounded by endless blue-green water, its near-clarity glowing and sparkling without dazzling, and the warmth radiating from it baking its way gently into them without being overwhelming. Above, a white marble castle presented with the form of a snub-nosed star fortress, almost as if made of polished chalk and seeking to trap the unwary eye in corners of curiosity, its clean lines and simple design still conveying a sense of understated power and mystery, cast against a pale pearl gray sky.

Jessie attached herself to Amy immediately as they proceeded along the paths, sniffing flowers together and adorning each other's hair with select feathers found along the way.

“Fascinating,” remarked Amelia, eyeing the too-near horizon as they explored the pathways and gazebos, birds and small beasts from all across time and space wandering by between beautifully tended plants and fungi of equally wide range, “Really remarkable, in fact! It certainly appears to be Miramare Castle, yet the layout is positively identical to that of an E-space inversion of Castrovalva. A temporally stabilized spatial nexus, to be sure. Still though...”

“Oh, I see that you're here at last. Well, you're just in time for the afternoon victuals. _We call it lunch._ ”

The man sitting at the head of the dining table cut a kingly figure, all dash and bravado, yet clearly hiding some actual capability beneath his thick veneer of vapid egotism. His outfit was of the finest thousand count satin weave Egyptian cotton and dyed ermine, a liquid black that begged the eyes to take a leisurely swim, notes of scarlet and threads of gold and silver throughout, the ruff at his throat serving somehow to enhance the whole, a fine powder of diamonds and other gemstones touching up and completing the ensemble.

“This is Kate – Kate, short for Bob,” he said, waving to a beautiful blond boy beside him, one whose features could well be mistaken for those of a fetching young woman and whose pageboy outfit might understandably be mistaken for that of a high end rent boy or courtesan, “– my ehm, my _man servant_ , the little scamp.

“...and that is Slave Asphyxia,” he added, now indicating the willowy thing sprawled before them, “You needn't pay her any heed, as she'll simply talk your ear off with how amazingly amazing I am.”

At their feet lounged Slave Asphyxia, her golden bikini accentuating her every curve, a garish display that served only as the visual equivalent of a foot in one's mouth, overstating all that should be nuanced. She spared the group a momentary glance, only to return her eyes to their previous engagement – that of adoring the blowhard in the bejeweled chair as she shifted her hips carefully.

“And I,” he declared grandly, “am Lord Blackadder, Master of the Known Universe. There are a string of other titles, but you may call me Lord Blackadder. I rather enjoyed playing that part.

“Foie gras? Oysters à la Russe?” he offered, a small chorus of bells chiming beatifically in the background, accompanied by an ephemeral choir of castrati just barely audible as the entrées began to arrive.

“ _Blackadder! Blackadder! His taste is rather odd._

_Blackadder! Blackadder! A randy little sod..._ ”

Several servants entered in French maid outfits, apparently legitimately so given their accents (most of them) as they introduced themselves as Yvette, Maria, Mimi, Michelle, and Helga **1**. Helga seemed a little out of place, and her outfit was a more severe thing, involving more leather than one might expect, but she seemed to be acting in more of an overseeing capacity. Each was quite solicitous of their guests, and managed to leave a “friendly” and perfumed note here and there as they curtsied to each guest in turn.

Glancing briefly at them, Amy was shocked at the suggestive figures sketched in each note.

Coffee was served with almond extract and a dash of Kahlúa. The creamer was a liqueur. The result was strong, and Amy found that her tongue kept alternating between a slow dance and a confused distaste, only to reach for another sip and begin again. The platters of koláče and miniature meal-croissants went a long way toward helping her make the coffee disappear, even so far as seeking another cup afterward with the cordyceps and architeuthis soup, its earthiness made all the richer with saffron and hints of mace and black cardamom.

“So,” Amelia began, looking around pointedly at cymatic patterns adorning the walls in floral life-like arrangements, the etiquette of pleasantries at last behind them, “A time cabinet... early fifty first century, if I don't miss my guess, though there are some anomalies?”

He tilted his head in ambiguous acknowledgment.

“I acquired it in the Great War. Europe was a shambles, as you know, what with one thing and another, and this was my ticket out of the front, though little did I suspect how very much at the time. There we were, one more push that Gerry would never expect – or so said the ever pretentious and infinitely blind General Melchett, _may he forever be chased through the Wood of Suicides and his tender bits be found_ _ **particularly**_ _chewy_ – incoming fire from both sides, mind. Then the guns stopped. Everything was silent when the ground gave way beneath us and we found ourselves here. It was no issue once I gathered the implications, but still a bit of a pain before I found the light switch. The rest, as one might say, is history.”

A soft boiled ostrich egg was being brought out on a bed of egg noodles even as he said this.

She nodded, waiting for him to get to his point.

“The finest foods of all time, constant _rumpy pumpy_ down the ages with all of the most beautiful women ever...” at this, the boy – _Kate_ – looked distinctly self-conscious, his face becoming somewhat strained while shifting a little as if his hose had begun to chafe rather uncomfortably down below and to the rear, “Oh, the times I've had assuming one alias and another – a fifteenth century prince, an Elizabethan lord, a Regency prince's servant, a mild mannered Victorian shopkeeper, and others... Well, this old... time cabinet... had a few rough edges about it, but I had one of my Baldricks beat up a certain monk while I nicked everything worthwhile from his time-box; the sorry git had just finished repairing it in the eleventh century and was standing there admiring his work, so it was the perfect time: everything was in good repair. Gave me no end of trouble adapting one to the other, but this isn't the dark ages.”

Lord Blackadder ended his story, chuckling as he imagined the likely look on the monk's face upon discovering all of the missing bits.

“That explains the Regency service,” Amelia observed dryly, glancing at the silver all around.

He beamed at this.

“Oh, quite. I enjoyed that caper so much that I went back a few times and did it all over again!”

“Odd,” Amelia said slowly, “You're sure that you had the right address? I ask only because it's not actually _possible_ to do what you're describing in the way that you describe it.”

He shrugged.

“I don't know anything about addresses, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” he replied, waving his fork as if to serve his point, “and we've all done a fair bit of eating.”

As if on cue, the fish course arrived. Ichthyosaur steaks Florentine with new potatoes in lemon butter and seared scallops with morels. This was accompanied by a crab leg. A single crab leg fully two meters in length, steamed, with a bowl of ghee for each diner.

“Spider crab,” he said before helping himself to some, his eyes alight.

“Me lord,” said a greasy looking Hobgoblin with a sketch of a salute that might have been an attempt to knock himself unconscious, “the Grand High Calculat sends her esteem and regards and... and... and some other things...”

His clothes were barely a step above rags, held together solely by layers of grime that had aged to become a resilient rubber cement, and quite possibly living a life of its own independent of the Homunculus – for surely only a Homunculus could one such as he be. His hat looked as if it had seen better days as a dunghill. His hair might have been used to sweep out a rat's midden, were the rat blind and had the hair been glued to its broom while being force fed magical beans that sent it into a frenzy of midden sweeping, and the rat in said fit of frenzy swept the sweepings only so far as to cover his face. These and many other less savory aspects all conspired to make a most disconcerting effect, breathing life into his form in ways that aberrations from madmen's cold-sweated dreams could themselves only dream of, yet went largely ignored for reasons best left alone, though none could for the very fact of their breathing.

As the strange looking... _person_... fumbled his way through this little speech, the travelers began sniffing, trying to find the source of a rank and peculiar odor.

“Yes, yes, and no doubt she's busy with some finishing touches of technowizardy, hmm? What of the Queen Consort Marian, then? Will she be joining us soon?”

There was a pause. One could almost see the rusted cog attempt to grind forward a notch at the philosophical conundrum that this question presented.

“I don't know, me lord. She said something about locking herself in her room with her maid, the other Marian. Only on account of how you done it first, see.”

“Fine, as long as Caroline **2** is amenable later, I don't care what those two contrive in the meantime.”

“Right, m'lo'd,” the Hobgoblin said as he shuffled away.

The air freshened noticeably.

“Baldrick. You simply can't get good help anywhere, these days,” Lord Blackadder said with a shrug, shaking his head.

“You rang, sir?”

There stood Baldrick once more, now in a shabby uniform, having left scant seconds before. Perhaps the uniform was meant to be olive, perhaps beige, possibly even gray. Strictly, one couldn't quite rule out anything in the spectrum – electromagnetic or otherwise. This was a task entirely outside of their powers of perception. Aside from the obvious, he looked ever so slightly older, while seeming almost alive and boisterous in contrast to his initial listless presence, presenting now with almost a youthful affect. Upon further inspection, which none wished for but could hardly avoid as their eyes refused to believe themselves, his hair had been cut to reveal a head shaped like a turnip, with the grease of his previous outfit having migrated to the remaining fringe of hair cowering atop his scalp. The spectacles that were dangled across his face were an improvement though, giving them all something to focus on other than his face.

“Oh, God!” Lord Blackadder said, as if bemoaning a fate worse than that of Sisyphus, “No, Balders, I was merely talking about one of you behind your backs.”

“Oh. Right you are, sir, I'll just be off then. Freshen your coffee, anyone?”

“Baldrick, if they were feeling adventurous, they might take in a swim in the Thames before quenching their thirst with the vibrant waters of a nineteenth century Broad Street fountain and then finish the day getting shagged by a particularly pustulent dead goat. Under no circumstance have they any wish to explore the contents of your coffee pot unless – and I feel that I cannot stress this strongly enough – they find a need to kill Death itself. Now leave.”

“Ahh, thank you very much, sir,” he said, shuffling away much as before.

“Clone? Time-copy? Alternative reality?” Amy asked.

“No,” Blackadder replied resignedly, “family retainer. His _whole_ family, I'm afraid. Try as I might, one of his descendants or another just keeps popping up like a bad button at _Baldrick's Bad Buttons Emporium_ in the middle of a fire sale. Every time you try to scrape him from your boot, there's just another layer beneath.”

At this, he turned his attention to the salad, florette baby leaf with caviar and truffles.

As their discussion continued to dance about without anyone ever coming around to the question of their presence, both parties acting as if it were perfectly normal and even an expected visit from old friends, the food continued as if in a dizzying parade of courses and paired wines: roasted peacock with assorted legumes, lamb chops with an artichoke-mango chutney, a delicate lime sorbet, pork tenderloin with a pear and raisin sauce, a cold buffet of tongue and vegetables in herbed aspic, an entrement of crêpes Suzette, savory Scotch woodcock with bacon and chicken liver, several cheeses, petits fours, and at long last tea and cordials with light fruit and nut pastries.

Amy met the end of this with considerable relief, having enjoyed each dish and surreptitiously loosening her belt thrice, but not having been prepared for so overwhelming a meal. Jessica didn't seem to have had any difficulty, but Amy had half-expected as much, given her navigation of future events. She should have followed Jessie's lead in following Jessica's lead of small portions, she thought ruefully. Amelia never showed any issues with her eating capacity, but this had long since failed to astound her.

“So,” Blackadder said, his tone clearly shifting to more serious matters, “You never did say: whatever brings you to my neck of the woods?”

Amelia looked around innocently at her companions.

“What makes you think that we came here for any particular reason?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he replied, “I can't quite put my finger on just why, precisely, but somehow it seems the tiniest bit unlikely that you'd manage to appear by complete accident in what amounts to a pocket universe with closed ports and no handshake protocols.”

Amelia smiled, “Do you know, it does occur to me that it's just possible that you might be able to help us. You see, we're looking for someone. Our height, red hair, identical features. You wouldn't happen to have seen her anywhere about, now would you?”

“What business might you have with her? After all, you could be criminals harboring some design on her body, for all that I know.”

“Well, I can't deny some designs on her body... and I suppose that there might be some places that hold a different interpretation of our actions at times...”

“Let's cut to the heart of the matter, shall we? You want something. You think that I have it, or her. If that is even the case to begin with, why would I hand her over to you? Logically I must have some interest in her myself, or I would simply have run her out here to begin with.

“I might not rule the universe in the usual sense, since I feel no need to – I'm perfectly happy popping out and playing my games in time and enjoying my life here – but in order to do this, I have certain needs that must be filled. A time cabinet needs a technowizard to keep things running properly; someone who knows the ins and outs of the system, the coupling of arcana and circuitry to control the doorways to other times and places. Someone who knows how to deal with those eldritch things that go bump in the night between the worlds.”

Amelia's look took on an almost devious aspect.

“I have a cunning plan,” she said with relish, looking around the room and adding things up, “What if I could provide a replacement at no cost? Fully trained?

“Kate? You'll go with the others here,” she continued rapidly, now gaining traction on what had tickled the edge of her thoughts, “Jessica can provide the proper dosage of spice to affect your pineal activation, and train you in the appropriate techniques to master it. Jessie here is a mathematician of first caliber, and will run you through everything that you need and more. While they're doing that, Jess will tutor you in technowizardry – she handled a similar position masterfully – and Jennifer – she isn't here right now, but you'll meet her over the course of your studies – will stuff you full of ancient texts on magic to no end.”

Here, she turned to Lord Blackadder once more, saying “His combined prowess will more than compensate for releasing Jess from your service. The solution presents itself, really. In fact, that's exactly true in three... two... one...”

She turned to the hall's main doors as they opened to another Amelia entering with Kate in tow.

“Just nipping in to say hello – wait, why does that sound familiar?” the new Amelia said, “Ooh, Amy! Can't wait to meet you and everyone else. Sorry I don't remember you yet, but you know how it is when someone pulls rank,” she leveled her gaze on Amelia at this, “Anyway, come along then Kate; miles to go and all that.”

“Just nipping in to say hello,” said another Amelia, stepping in a moment later, “or am I right about to say that already? _Ladies_...” she said with a lascivious look that took in most of the traveling group.

“Anyway,” she continued, “here's Kate, and he's shown enormous promise, I must say.”

At this, Kate stepped in, trailing a travel case loaded with books and electronic gadgetry strapped all over it.

A confused Kate stood beside Blackadder as he nodded for him to go accompany the first Amelia to have joined them.

“There you have it, then. With Kate now up to speed, you should be able to keep your... _House_ ” Amelia said with a peculiar emphasis, “well in order,” lifting her glass in a toast and grinning as if in response to a private joke.

Jess had been waiting in the eaves, listening for her cue to enter.

As Blackadder began to clap, she joined the impromptu party in progress. It wasn't a hearty clap, but one of quiet appreciation nonetheless. It had a ring to it of Moriarty having been caught up to by Holmes.

“And now we meet at last, it seems,” he smiled, “Well done! It's been a delight to work with you, but I must confess that I've had the very devil of a time holding my tongue.”

“You hid it well, I grant,” Amelia replied, “But a bit too well, I'm afraid. You never once remarked on our arrival or our identical likenesses.”

“Touché,” he nodded, lifting his glass to her, “though I still take heart in having had the laugh this time, having awaited it ever since I first met you – and now, it's your turn to wait and wonder how _that_ goes.”

“It's all set in the main room,” Jess told the new Kate, hugging him as one would a dear friend, “and I'll be sure to train you up on it exactly as it is, so you should find everything in order there now.”

“Oh, your training was most excellent indeed, and may I say good show of it!” he replied, his voice a piping tenor, almost a falsetto, though with more breadth to its timbre, “I'll do my best to fill your shoes.”

The afternoon passed to evening in a more relaxed manner, old friends and new talking shop while taking caution not to reveal too much of subjectively future events. The time that Jess had spent working with the time cabinet had been fascinating and of great practical experience, and she was hungry to apply it to the SARDIV, though the more arcane aspects would have to await Jennifer's arrival.

Jessica sat sipping her tea, taking it all in, when she felt a spice vision coming on.

She could see the room around her stilling, aware of it all but knowing a sense of bilocation, another place and time taking precedence as she was pulled deep into it, that _elsewhen_ becoming extended in an instant.

_A man stood there at what could be two or three paces distance, his face given an odd hue in the lightless light, the few structures framing him sketched in as if unreal and given ephemerality only as a frame for the scene. She couldn't see the person with whom he was talking, though that person must stand between them and just to the side. She hovered there as she might over the other person's shoulder, but could only feel his ghostly presence – and it was masculine, she knew that much – **knowing** that he was there as she might have proprioceptively her own hand without looking, but here feeling him no more than the shape of a heat shimmer. That he was real she had no doubt. That he had physical presence she had no doubt. That this physicality meant anything like what she would normally apply to the term she was equally certain to be untrue._

_This essence, this physicality, was something other. Alien. A meaningless term applied to a variable that had as much bearing on this entity as it would to an electronically generated character in a computer program – to toggle the variable one way or another within the environment bore meaning therein, and only therein._

_The man with the strange face was talking. What he looked like meant nothing to her. She could see the features that he wore here, but they were irrelevant. He had this face now, but could as easily appear as another. His form and apparition were things of the moment, as inconstant as the listener's physical presence. **Who** he was though, that she would recognize were she to ever see him again. His “shape,” his “scent” – his psychic aura was unmistakable. She knew him now, and would know him in true sight again, his appearance notwithstanding._

_Something about him suggested an art critic... or more a mechanic or a stage hand gliding behind the scenes._

_An Auditor._

_This vision that wasn't a vision, this sensory representation of events that weren't happening in the literal fashion here, only evocative of some more complicated thing without form... extending his hand to the other, or at least giving the impression of such, she heard the last of their exchange._

_“...she still owes me,” the Auditor murmured after a moment, as if having reached a decision to decline payment, “and I'm still alive.”_

_She could feel that the other had thanked him of sorts, and knew that this was in response to something that the Auditor had done, some service that had saved Jess. It was only a fact, known here as much as one knows that air is in every breath without thought given to it. Whatever he had done that had benefited Jess, Jessica was glad of, but it had come with a price not yet paid._

_At this, the Auditor looked at her, or straight through her, as if knowing that someone were there, feeling her awareness without quite seeing who she was._

Then she was back in the dining hall, no fraction of time having passed as the conversation continued at pace around her. The light and warmth were as present as before, while now feeling cold and airless. She was still in that other place, the no-place. The not-place. The negative level with the silent voices.

Her heart went out to Jess, who sat laughing at something that Amelia had just said teasingly about Jessie being draped over Amy's shoulder.

_It all looks and feels so light and carefree on the surface_ , she thought as things held a dimmer light around them on another level, pale and listless. A moment to be held tight, treasured against storms yet to come.

She would tell them soon enough, and it would shake their confidence, but they'd need to know.

Whatever else, they would need to know.

=====

“Kate? Two points. One: Kate was smitten with him, which I'd hardly call abandonment to one's fate. Two: you didn't pay enough attention there; no winkle, just some socks or something. Though you are right in that Lord Blackadder does seem to have a certain predilection for buggery,” Amelia replied as her hand slid down past Amy's waist for a good, long squeeze.

Jess confirmed Amelia's guess with a smug look and a knowing twitch of her eyebrow as they headed into the SARDIV.

“And on that note,” Amelia said lightly, “Amelia will be joining us later this evening, and if you're _very_ good, so might Amelia...”

**O ~~~ O**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **1** French waitresses: Many readers will likely have gotten the mixed Blackadder references, but the waitresses might not be quite as obvious. They hail from “'Allo 'Allo”. (I'm on the fence about other house staff, such as Polly of “Fawlty Towers” and Miss Brahms of “Are you being served?”; other house staff must be present, logically, but just who they are is left to the reader's imagination.)
> 
> **2** Caroline: This would be Countess Caroline of Luxembourg. (Would Panacaea, of “Asterix and Obelix”, be too much?)


End file.
